贾君鹏

What does 贾君鹏 mean?

On 16 July 2009 someone typed a single line into Baidu Tieba's World of Warcraft forum: 贾君鹏你妈妈喊你回家吃饭, Jia Junpeng, your mom is calling you home for dinner. No context, no photo, no reply from Jia Junpeng, who may not exist. Within hours the post pulled in hundreds of thousands of views, and the replies piled up not with answers but with improvisation: Jia Junpeng is eating, Jia Junpeng is on his way, I am Jia Junpeng. The line became a template overnight, usable on anyone who stays out too late, and the imaginary boy became the forum's mascot during a summer with nothing else to do.

Where does 贾君鹏 come from?

The timing made it. Summer 2009 was when World of Warcraft changed Chinese operators and the servers went dark for weeks, so millions of players had no game and camped in the forums instead. An anonymous account posted the line, and the idle crowd turned it into performance art; the reply count climbed into the tens of thousands within a day and kept growing. Chinese media covered the phenomenon, scholars were asked to explain it, and every generation of forum users has recycled the joke since.

How to use 贾君鹏

• 室友半夜还没回来，我在群里发了句：贾君鹏，你妈喊你回家吃饭。
  Shìyǒu bànyè hái méi huílái, wǒ zài qún lǐ fā le jù: Jiǎ Jūnpéng, nǐ mā hǎn nǐ huí jiā chī fàn.
  My roommate still wasn't back at midnight, so I posted in the group chat: Jia Junpeng, your mom says come home for dinner.
• 老论坛的怀旧帖又把这句话翻了出来，评论区清一色的贾君鹏前来报到。
  Lǎo lùntán de huáijiù tiě yòu bǎ zhè jù huà fān le chūlái, pínglùnqū qīngyīsè de Jiǎ Jūnpéng qiánlái bàodào.
  A nostalgia thread dug the line up again, and the comments filled with people reporting in as Jia Junpeng.